Gearing Up for the 2020 Educators in VR Summit, with Daniel Dyboski-Bryant and Lorelle VanFossen

Welcome to the premier episode of the XR for Learning Podcast, with your host, Julie Smithson! On this show, we’ll be exploring in-depth the power XR has to improve the learning experience for mankind across all sectors. We start that mission speaking with the co-founders of Educators in VR, who host the world’s largest immersive conference for educators, to share and explore VR together.

Julie: Welcome to the XR for Learning podcast and this is your host, Julie Smithson. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us. I’d like to introduce two of my first guests, Lorelle VanFossen and Daniel Dyboski-Bryant from Educators In VR. Lorelle is a co-founder of Educators In VR, an open membership and social profit organization dedicated to providing training and educational programs that will integrate virtual technologies into education for educators, learners, researchers, and passionate enthusiasts. And she’s a keynote speaker, a trainer, an educator, writer/author, and consultant specializing in digital storytelling and web publishing. Daniel is a lifelong educator specializing in virtual and augmented reality, immersive technologies, 360 media, teacher training, communication, and languages. And he speaks five languages. He’s the [co-]founder of Educators In VR, and I’ve been looking forward to having a conversation today about the international summit. Welcome, both of you.

Daniel: Thank you very much.

Lorelle: Thank you.

Daniel: Excited to be here.

Julie: I want to go deep into
the international summit. But maybe if you guys can kind of talk
about how was Educators In VR born? Like, where did it come from? And
maybe you guys can talk about how you guys collaborated.

Lorelle: A moment of insanity. Well, how it actually got started is that I was talking to Dr. Erica Southgate in VR, we were in AltspaceVR. And I said, we keep bitching about all the different pros and cons of educators really struggling to embrace this technology and the challenges that face them, and the eagerness and passion that so many of them had. And I said, we need to have an educators in VR meetup. This is silly. We need to to make this a bigger conversation, because it’s a huge conversation. And the moment we started talking about it, we just exploded with ideas and we realized it was much bigger than the two of us. And so she brought in Daniel and another person, and we had our first Educators In VR meet-up. We thought there would be, I don’t know, what do you think, 20, 30 people? There were something like 180.

Daniel: Yeah.

Lorelle: [laughs] It just– no
one knew how to use any of the tools, or anything to accommodate that
many people. So it became a– It was great. It was fantastic, very
few people in front of the scenes knew that everybody was panicking
on the back end, because it was just overload. And we went, “Oh,
there’s something there.” And it ended up that Daniel and I
founded it, made it official. We host, once a week, workshops in
AltspaceVR, but we also travel to other platforms and do all kinds of
special events. And we’ve had over– I think it’s almost 5,000 people
come through in a little over a year. And now we have this 2020
Educators In VR International Summit, which again started with “Oh,
why don’t we do this? We’ll get like 40 people together, and see what
happens. It’ll be a few days and we’ll do this conference.” And
we put out the speaker form during the holidays. I mean, who pays
attention to anything during the holidays? And we had over 150
applications.

Julie: Incredible. Incredible.
It’s stunning.

Lorelle: And there’s this thing
that happens when you’re doing any kind of an event. You go, all
right, what kind of logistics do we have? How much room do we have?
How much physical space do we have? Hire a high school or college, or
where we’re gonna do this, a convention center? And Daniel and I were
talking about, “Wait a minute, we’re doing this virtual. Isn’t
virtual infinite?”

Daniel: Yeah.

Julie: Yeah.

Lorelle: And he said, “Yep,
let’s go.” There it is. And that’s how the Educators In VR was
born.

Daniel: Pretty much. It’s
interesting, because around the time that Lorelle and Erica were
having this idea of Educators In VR, I was having obviously a similar
idea, which is how we met. And it feels a little bit like the timing
was so spot on that a wave picked us up and just accelerated us. So
we all know the industry, how fast it’s moving. But for Educators In
VR, we felt like we sat in a rocket and it’s accelerating. We went
from one event a month, now we’re doing several a week. We went from
starting a Discord just to have a place for the community meet, we
have 600-700 members. The appetite for what we seem to have, the
sweet spot we seem to have found is just immense. And the response to
the call for speakers to the summit just shows that. 160-170
speakers, you should have a look at the schedule that Lorelle has put
together. It’s insanity.

Lorelle: It’s spreadsheet glory.

Julie: That’s amazing. Now,
maybe you guys can explain, how did you bring this community
together? Because I’m a part of it and I’m not an educator. But there
are many teachers from around the world that are joining this
platform, as well as developers, too. So how did you get the word
out?

Daniel: It’s passion. And I
think it’s– a lot of it is timing. So Lorelle’s background, her
skillset is perfect for this. And my naïveté and innocence is also
perfect for this. [chuckles] And I think we met at an ideal time,
when the standalone headsets were coming to educators and the
platforms were ready to host this kind of stuff. So a number of
factors came together. And we put on– I think we found a name that
does what it says on the tin: Educators In VR, you know what it is,
you know what to expect when you get there. And so Lorelle suggested
we put together a Discord server. I didn’t know Discord at the time,
but it’s a stroke of genius, because it allows us behind the scenes
in between the VR events. It allows us to communicate–

Lorelle: To keep the
conversation going.

Daniel: –post links, share
resources, to explore together. And then when we have the live
events, it’s not just a standalone line event. People find us there
and they know, OK, if I’m joining this, I’ve got a Discord, the
conversation. So it goes both ways. People come to the Discord, join
the live events; people go to live events, join the Discord. And it’s
cyclical. And I think both of the platforms and the tech we have now
just reaches so far. On Facebook, there’s various groups as well. And
people end up finding us.

Lorelle: Something’s really
interesting about this as well. Right now, VR is at a level where
students and teachers — for the most part, I’m not talking blanket
across — are on the same level. And they’re able to access this
equipment on their own or through their funding and whatnot. Instead
of what usually happens is that when it comes to this kind of
technology, the teachers are chasing the student.

Daniel: Yes.

Lorelle: In many respects. And
you had just– simple technology with mobile devices and things like
that was always behind. Website development, always behind the
students and different things. Just always chasing, chasing, chasing.
And right now, we’re at a moment where there’s many teachers are
getting this equipment and they’re saying, “Oh wow, you know,
this is great, or the kids are in there, they’re using it and go,
this is cool.” And they’re saying, how can we include that in
education? At the same time, students are getting– are receiving
Quest or Go or whatever it is. And they’re saying, “This is
great. Now it’s fun to play games and shoot ’em ups.” but this
is something more than that. We can actually learn things as we’re
doing this. It’s very rare that you get this kind of technology to
match and that’s where we are. So we have passionate student makers.
We have incredibly passionate educators that are embracing this. And
I am stunned at the level of academic research that is going into,
why is this working? Why is this happening? Because it’s really easy
to say, “OK. So we have some tests coming out of China and
places, that say that learning in VR promotes increased memory
retention.” Now, why? Why does it do that? And then all the
sublayers that go underneath, is it the wow factor? Is it more than–
is it fight or flight, or what it is really doing it? But then
there’s all these other layers about the avatars, and embodiment, and
presence, and anxieties, and phobias and oh my gosh.

There’s another aspect as well that is,
I think, one of the reasons that the community is coming together is
that Lorelle and I started really grassroots. We weren’t a company
with a solution that we were pushing. We were a bunch of educators
coming together and just happy to meet another educator, and the
community response to that. And we have such a breadth of different
people. It’s not all teachers. We have teachers, trainers, educators,
researchers, developers, organizations coming on board. It seems to
be attracting like the light attracts the moth, it seems to be
attracting everybody around. And that mix of different skillsets,
different insights. It’s exciting.

Lorelle: Julie, if we can, I
want to tell you about some of the speakers that are going to be
speaking at the international summit,.

Julie: Please. Yes. That was my
next question, is who are these amazing 160 people from around the
world that volunteered?

It’s incredible. These are all– again,
the 2020 Educators In VR International Summit is February 17th
through the 22nd. Majority of events are in AltspaceVR. But we also
have events in ENGAGE, in– Oh, I’m gonna forget! [laughs] I’ve been
looking at these too much. Help me, Daniel!

Daniel: rumii, Mozilla Hubs,
possibly Rec Room. Somnium Space, which if you haven’t heard of, is
quite exciting. Who else we got? ENGAGE VR, we should say, a good
friend of ours. So pretty much most of the multi-user or social VR
platforms that are known are jumping on board with us. And it’s
exciting.

Lorelle: Oh, it’s amazing.
Before we get to to, I want to highlight a few speakers just randomly
out of our lists that are fascinating. And then I’ll have Daniel talk
about some of the VIPs we have coming. But I first want to tell you
that while I thought what we were doing is groundbreaking — which I
tend to fall into those groundbreaking moments, I love it — but I
found out this past week that event of this size– This is a six day
event, across multiple platforms. Everything is virtual. If somebody
wants to have the livestream in their space, wherever they are in the
real world, that’s fine. I don’t care. This is completely virtual. No
airplane tickets, no having to buy carbon credits. There is no
hotels. There’s no none of this stuff is going on. There’s no
physical buildings were in. We’re just chewing up servers. So it’s
very, very green friendly conference. But what is amazing is we
didn’t realize that nothing like this has ever been done in immersive
VR before. I didn’t know that.

Daniel: Not at this scale. Not
cross-platform.

Lorelle: Yes.

Daniel: Certainly.

Lorelle: It’s just amazing. And
I told the Altspace people — because that’s where most of our events
are — I said “We’re going to break Altspace.” And they
said, “Bring it on!” [laughs] Yes, I love that.

Daniel: It’s a stress test.

Lorelle: That’s a challenge.

Daniel: Exactly.

Lorelle: Yeah. It makes it
amazing. So it is completely free. It’s totally open. There’s no
registration, no nothing. Either beancounters are freaking out, but
we’re gonna make this happen. So I just randomly want to pick a few
things here and then have Daniel do the VIPs. We have Chaz Prairie
Chicken, who’s from– helped to develop an app called USAY. It’s an
AR app — augmented reality app — that brings back the Blackfoot
language in a novel form, to allow people who speak it or do not
speak it to learn it as if they’re reading a novel. So it’s bringing
back this almost lost language in AR. We have many, many topics that
deal with disabilities, with elder care, with dementia, tons with
cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology. Maya Bartolf has created
XR Super Girls, an amazing meetup organization that is working with
STEM development in VR and AR and XR that is just totally changing
the world. I just absolutely love that. Oh, Dance! The Dance– who
are the Dance people? I’m trying to find that. There’s this couple
that teaches dance in VR, and they are doing two sessions. Partner
dancing, they’re doing partner dancing. So we have Rebekah Diaz and
her partner is Jorge [Ortiz] — I’m trying to find his name too —
doing dance in VR and partner dancing in VR. I mean, that’s amazing.
And they use–

Julie: That’s incredible.

Lorelle: Yeah, they’re using
immersive bodysuits to do this. And so it’s just– it’s really
amazing. We have someone you may know, Alan Smithson is gonna be
talking about–

Daniel: [chuckles]

Lorelle: –XR democratizing
education on a global level. I’m so excited about that. We have
digital storytelling, we have biochemistry using 3D modelling. We
have people doing research in so much connectivity issues in
accessibility and diversity. Shachar — I think it’s Shachar —
“Vice” Weiss — he’s just known as Vice — is going to do a
presentation called “Hard Hat Not Required: XR in nuclear power
and other industries.” We have language studies, we have
diversity, we have accessibility, we have aging, we have the
psychology, the research, medical science, computer programming.
V-coaching, which is the virtual coaching and personal development.
Have I missed anything? There’s corporate case uses and studies,
medical things. I think I’ve now– repeat development, and it’s all
over the map and it’s amazing to bring that diversity together in one
place, unlike you would in most conferences.

Daniel: Because it really
reflects what’s going on on the ground around the world. And this is
an opportunity for everybody to come together and share. I mean,
there’s amazing work happening in the world, but to actually bring it
together virtually, it’s like walking your talk. It’s the perfect
application. This is the perfect use case, as far as I’m concerned.
People are talking about the killer app for VR immersive technology.
It’s collaborative social VR. And this is a perfect use case for it.

Julie: Educators In VR. It
sounds like there’s learning for everybody. There is really no
barriers to entry at this point. If we’re offering all of these
different conversations and presentations that include every single
industry and every aspect–

Daniel: And also, every single
level of experience. So there’s people who’ve started recently, but
they’re doing something different, something interesting. Let them
speak. It’s not– Why always the bigwigs? I mean, we’ve got some
bigwigs as well. I’ll tell you about them in a minute. But we want to
represent regular people, with maybe you go in a classroom and a
couple of learners, and just hear what they’re doing. Because it’s so
new, everybody has something to add.

Lorelle: And it’s also covering
a diversity of from — like Daniel just said — the very basics, to
people that are deep diving into high level graduate studies and
research, very technological research and use cases and white papers
and so on. Really diving deep to help us understand, and they’re
sharing that. So when you have “here’s some basic things, how to
do this” and “here’s the psychology and the philosophy that
goes in behind, and deep dive” right next to each other. It’s
going to be amazing and I’m so excited! [laughs]

Julie: It sounds so exciting.
And I think it’s key to just kind of highlight those educators that
are so important today to the future generation.

Daniel: Exactly.

Julie: And bringing this
technology back into classrooms, even into conversations at home. And
even one of the things that I talk about now is helping parents
understand this technology. And there’s no reason why anybody can’t
join any of these presentations that you’re gonna be hosting in the
next couple of weeks, because there is such a wide scope of various
topics and applications to real lives that are changing. And we all
need to learn these things.

Daniel: It goes all the way
through lifelong learning, so we’re all learners. It’s like a breadth
of age as well. It can be from K-12, right up to people who are– I
heard a beautiful term, “VR bucket list”, people who are
not going to go to chance to travel and go on all these expensive
things. But in VR they get the next best thing. It’s beautiful.

Lorelle: And what I really would
love, I love the idea that you brought up the parents. I would love
to have so many of these parents to experience these things and
learning about these things, because they need to know that the
potential is out there, to educate their children above and beyond,
not only the school, but to bring these things to the school. I was
talking to someone just last week who said that while they’re an
educator — they love VR and the potential of it — they’re also a
parent. And they went into their their kid’s school and went to the
teacher and said, “You need to put this on and try this.”
The teacher said, “Well, I’m not putting this on.” She
said, “Trust me.” and after much prodding and “I don’t
have time.” and “This is weird.” And “Why are you
making me do this?” put it on and went “Whaaaa!!” And
I think they did the Anne– tour the Anne Frank house. And I think–

Daniel: Yeah.

Lorelle: Yeah, he was Anne
Frank. It might have been the one with– one of the nature ones.

Daniel: Who wouldn’t be moved by
that?

Lorelle: Yeah. And the teacher
was completely blown away, and so who knows. Said “OK. You’ve
sold me.” Think of how hard parents work to try to get
educational topics or whatever into a classroom or try to improve the
class. [blows raspberry] VR, is it? [laughs] Easy sell, easy sell!

Julie: Yeah. There you go. There
you go. So how can people find out about who’s speaking and when they
can sign up and how they can be a part of it? And do you have any
registration caps for how many people can attend certain sessions,
and that sort of thing? Maybe you can just give a round-out how
people can find out more.

Lorelle: All right. So I’m going
to give the round-up, and then we do want to mention the VIPs. Daniel
gets that. All right. So go to educatorsinvr.com. We’ll have the
full– we’re trying to get that schedule all up there. It’s quite
complex. And that will soon have links to all the different events.
All the events are free. There’s no registration that’s involved. And
we need sponsorship to help cover that. So that’s a different
discussion. But if you want to help as a volunteer, you want to help
sponsor those to cover all of our costs to do this, we’d love it. We
have all that information, it’s on educatorsinvr.com. And you can
also join our Discord channel, discord.me/educatorsinvr. We also
Facebook and everything, that hopefully are put in the show notes.
But we– Discord is our main activity space, where we have tons of
activity. We have almost a thousand members. We’re just rockin in
there. And then Facebook is secondary to that. But we– just go there
and you can also go to AltspaceVR, find out the events there, and
they’ll be listed also in ENGAGE and the other platforms. But the
main one is educatorsinvr.com. And then just find the events in your
timezone, make a note of when they are, or you can go in there and
hit RSVP and save those, and Altspace will send you an email an hour
before the event. The other platforms you have to remember in your
head or set something on your calendar. And then just show up in VR,
on Oculus Go, on Oculus Quest, and Vive, and Rift, and all the other
names. Or you can come in 2D, or you can go to our YouTube channel
and watch the stream. We’ll not have all of it on the stream, but
we’ll have a lot of events hopefully on there.

With regards to how many people can
join, in Altspace, they have something called “front row”.
So you can get quite a lot of users into one event, in what’s called
“mirrored rooms”. On some of the other platforms there’s a
cap of 30, 40 people, so it’s wise to get in early and show
eagerness. But a lot of our events will be streamed as well. So if
you don’t get in the room, you can pick up the feed in one of our
Altspace rooms, which will be streaming most of the other events. And
then finally, I just want to mention the Rock Out, the summit event
on Saturday the 22nd will be in Somnium Space, trying to break a
record of the most avatars or people in the same space in VR. Somnium
Space allows up to 100, up to possibly 200, depending on how many
people come there. It does require PCVR, but we’re going to try and
break a record with them. They’re launching their new client and they
also said, “come try and break us.” And that’s what we’re
going to try to do.

Lorelle: The opening ceremony–
the opening ceremonies are an AltspaceVR on the 17th.

Daniel: Right.

Lorelle: Called the Rock In.

Julie: Amazing. That sounds it
sounds like such a virtual party.

Daniel: It’s going to be wild. I
think it’s time for a quick–

Lorelle: Yeah. Who are the top
people within the pro– I mean, everybody is special in this event.
That’s why we work very, very hard to make everybody special. But
who’s our special specials, besides Julie? [laughs]

Julie: Yes, I will be speaking.
I will have one of the speaking slots. I’m looking forward to
speaking about cloud learning.

Daniel: As are we. Couple other
people who might– names that you might recognize is Tom Furness from
the Virtual Society.

Lorelle: Virtual World Society.

Daniel: Yeah, he is — thank you
— he’s an absolute legend. He looks like Father Christmas. And he’s
known as the grandfather– the godfather of VR. He’s been doing VR
since the 60s.

Julie: That’s correct.

Daniel: We also have Gabriel
René, author of “The Spatial Web”, whose book was recently
released to great acclaim. And he’s doing amazing work. He’s bringing
people together to try and keep the next iteration of the web — the
spatial web — as free, as democratized, and as accessible as
possible. So really excited about him. Many people might know Charlie
Fink, an AR legend is coming coming to join a panel, I think of a
keynote as well. We have Alvin Wang Graylin of HTC Vive, to give a
keynote and join a panel as well. Steve Bambury, many people know CPD
in VR. He was one of the first to do these kind of teacher training
development sessions. Steve Bambury’s a really good friend of ours,
excited to have him on. We also have Benjamin de Wit of VR Days. VR
Days is a conference in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam. It’s been
going for a number of years and he’s quite visionary. So really
looking forward to hearing about him. He’s going to speak about how
virtual events and events are some of the best ways to drive the XR
industry forward. Kent Bye, of Voices Of VR podcast. He’s — I think
— done a 1,800 interviews, which is absolutely amazing. So he’s
going to be coming and speaking about trends that he’s observing on
design in educational VR. Who else we got? We got Artur Sychov
himself, from Somnium Space. Mat Chacon, from rumii. Elgin[-Skye
McLaren] from Hubs. We’ve got all the leaders of the social VR
platforms. Chris Madsen and Tamara Hughes from– Chris Madsen is from
ENGAGE and Tamara Hughes is from Rec Room. And more people, but
really, really excited about every single speaker. And of course, to
have a couple of notable names is really lovely as well.

Lorelle: And that’s just the tip
of the iceberg. There’s so many people on here that deserve to have
named credit going on as well. So go to educatorsinvr.com and check
out the schedule and come rockin’ with us. It’s going to be amazing.
As we truly are– I have a reputation of having broken the Internet
and Twitter and a few other things in my long career. And now I’m
going to try to break the virtual world, obviously. [laughs]

Julie: Amazing. Well, all the
power to you. It sounds like you have a great lineup, and certainly
excited to be a part of it myself, but also to share with my
community and network. And that’s our hope right now is, this
podcast, that we do share it out with the world, so that we can have
as many educators — and parents and enterprise, whoever is looking
to learn — is welcome to this conference that be running from
February 17th to the 22nd, and that’ll be running 24 hours a day.
From what I understand, with the amount of speakers.

Daniel: Yep, pretty much.

Lorelle: Yeah, yeah. We have 1-4
events every hour. And I want to take a second to say, Julie,
congratulations on your first podcast. We are so blessed to be–.

Julie: Thank you!

Lorelle: –your first guests. So
you know what this means, every year now, you have to bring us back
on our anniversary, and your anniversary. [laughs]

Julie: Well, with the amount —
of course! — and the amount of changes in this industry and what’s
going on, I’m really sure that it’ll be much less than a year before
we do this again. Because there’s so many things to talk about,
there’s so many things to educate people about, and the approach to
teaching VR and AR in the classroom, that’s– the mantra here is
trying to explain how we’re changing the way that we learn and we
teach in the classroom using this technology. So I look forward to
further conversations, for sure.

Daniel: A little tease of that
point. So we’re completely 100 percent focused on the summit. But I
just want to tease you. We have two or three other projects that are
at least as exciting as this in the works.

Julie: Amazing. Looking forward
to it. We’ll have to have another podcast to talk about those other
special projects. Any other last words about the Educators In VR
International Summit?

Lorelle: Well, I would like to
just say this. When I’m working with speakers and doing training and
stuff and teaching people how to teach in VR, I tell them that the
only way to grab someone’s attention, to really hold onto someone’s
attention, is to either show them something they’ve never seen
before, or show it to them in a way they’ve never seen it before. And
since it’s really hard to show people something they’ve never seen
before — because we’ve pretty much seen it all — what VR does is
allows us to show people things in a way they’ve never seen them
before. And that’s what is changing education with XR technology, is
we’re able to look at things in a very, very different way and see
how things work by being inside of them, where it’s dangerous or
being up in spaces where we just really aren’t safe to be, or that
are new and distinctive ways of looking at things. And what we’re all
a part of is truly, truly groundbreaking earthquake kind of stuff.

Daniel: I got a couple of things
just briefly, if I may. I want to say a huge, huge thank you to all
the volunteers, all the helpers, to Lorelle specifically, to the —
who else we got? — the speakers, everybody who’s– the whole
community that is coming around this and making it what it’s gonna
be. Huge, huge, huge hank you. Lorelle mentioned we are still looking
for sponsors. We’ve got some thank you for the sponsors we’ve got.
Please, please come help us sponsor this event, because you won’t
only be making this come true, but we’ll be looking to bring some of
the other following projects. So we’re looking for partnerships,
sponsorships, any kind of support, still looking for volunteers.

Lorelle: Definitely.

Daniel: Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.

Lorelle: This is a huge village
that is making this happen. Amazing people who are giving of their
time and helping to make this all happen. So thank you to everyone.

Julie: That’s a great way to
wrap up this episode. And thank you both for your initiatives to
bring this to the world. We all need this bit of learning. And the
Educators In VR International Summit sounds like a great place to
start for 2020. So thank you to you and both of your leadership in
making this happen. And I think that’s a wrap. Thank you so much.
Both Lorelle and Daniel from Educators In VR, and for listening on
the XR for Learning podcast.